Eclairs and Existentialism

This is a Charlotte Poire Verveine, in case
you wondered.

Paris Life - No. 16

by Laurel
Avery

Paris:- Friday, 12. September:-I may have broken
the world record in sugar consumption. Yesterday I met with
friends at the tea room, Ladurée, which has been in
business since 1862. As I walked in the door I was accosted
by row upon row of diabolical confections whose only
purpose is to keep Dr. Atkins and his ilk in business.

According to the information on Ladurée's web
site, they use 60 tons of butter and 30 tons of chocolate
annually. They neglected to list the tons of sugar used, no
doubt because they would be hauled off to prison and
accused of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Of the four salons located in Paris, we visited the one
on the Rue Bonaparte in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
One can have tea and pastries upstairs in a parlor that
seems to have come right out of the pages of a Victorian
novel. It is a 'Prussian Blue' room, full of low,
comfortable damask-covered chairs and round tables in the
Second Empire style that encourage intimate conversation,
and indeed, we were there for over two hours chatting,
surrounded by walls hung with 19th-century nature
photographs.

The 'Prussian Blue' room.

The famous cafés, 'Les Deux Magots' and the
'Café de Flore' are just down the street, and I
couldn't help but think that Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir and their other existentialist companions would
have had a much more positive view of life if they had just
hung out at Ladurée instead - had there been a
branch there in the 1930s and '40s - but the rue Bonaparte
location did not appear until 2002.

How can one be an atheist when confronted with a
'Religieuse au Chocolat,' a round, two-tiered pastry filled
with chocolate cream? And pessimism goes right out the
window after a few bites of a macaroon.

The existentialists, believing there was no predestined
moral order, asserted that each individual must make every
choice according to his own personal dictates and take full
responsibility for that choice.

It's understandable, then, why they may not have enjoyed
spending time at Ladurée, a place where,
once the difficult choice
is made between the 'Bayadère' - a crushed almond
biscuit with vanilla cream and soft and candied apricots -
and 'The Black Symphony' - cocoa biscuit layered with thin
slices of Madagascar chocolate, chocolate cream, and
sprinkled with chocolate bits - one must live with the
fattening consequences.

A Religièuse au
Chocolat.

Come to think of it, Sartre may have snuck in there when
nobody was looking, because he wrote a novel titled 'La
Nausée' - Nausea - caused, no doubt, by his
inability to make a choice among the 40 cakes and pastries
on the menu, and, by choosing both the 'Rhum Millefeuille'
and the 'Chocolate Eclair,' had to live for at least a few
hours with the consequences of this choice and thus, the
title of the book.

I'm not sure who invented the éclair, but the
word in French means 'flash of lightning.' When I
discovered this I was struck by - pardon the pun - the
vision of a bunch of long puffy 'choux' pastries filled
with chocolate and coffee cream floating around in the
sky.

It's possible that the first recipient of this pastry
just dropped dead on the spot from pleasure. So if you
visit Ladurée, be sure that your health insurance
policy is up to date!